THE CATHOLIC SANCTUARY AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

by Michael Davies

THE "LITURGICAL EXPERTS" TAKE OVER

Cardinal Heenan's reference to "liturgical experts" is crucial if we are to
understand the reason for the orgy of destruction in our sanctuaries which
followed the Council. Those who exercised the greatest influence during Vatican
Council II were not the Council Fathers, the three thousand bishops and heads of
religious orders who had come to Rome from all over the world, but the expert
advisers they brought with them, referred to in Latin as the periti.
Bishop Lucey of Cork and Ross stated explicitly that the periti were the
people with power. Cardinal Heenan warned that when the Council was over the
periti were planning to use the Council documents in a manner which the
Council Fathers had not envisaged. The documents were to be interpreted and
implemented by commissions to be established after the Council. Cardinal Heenan
warned against the danger of the periti taking control of these
Commissions, thus gaining the power to interpret the Council to the world. "God
forbid that this should happened," he cried, but happen it did.

The Commission established to implement the Liturgy Constitution was known as
the Consilium, and it took the extraordinary step of asking six
Protestants, six heretics, to advise them in drawing up their plans to reform
the liturgy of the Mass which has been the principal object of Protestant hatred
since the time of Martin Luther. These Protestants played a very active part in
all the discussions on the reform of the liturgy as one of them confirmed in a
letter to me.

The fact that the Liturgy Constitution did not mandate any changes in the
sanctuary did not in the least daunt the pseudo-liturgists once the Council was
over and the bishops had returned to their dioceses. A seemingly endless series
of documents was generated, and is still being generated, by the vast liturgical
bureaucracy that has proliferated since the Council.